Remote management and monitoring of networks is becoming more and more common. Furthermore, providing security services to customers is also important in protecting a customer's network against any type of intrusion. Several applications are available to service providers for providing remote network management services, monitoring services and security services to customers. Typically, a service provider runs a network management center that provides a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to a customer. The VPN provides a plurality of connections between the network management center and a number of customer sites. The connections may be established through, for example, a public Internet. Each customer site has a LAN (Local Area Network) and applications at the network management center manage, monitor and provide security for equipment in the LANs. In monitoring several customer sites, the network management center must query the equipment in the LANs at the customer sites. This results in much information being transferred through the VPN and can result in bottlenecks at the network management center when the network management center provides services for many customers. Furthermore, in some cases a connection to a customer site may be unavailable due to, for example, congestion in the public Internet or due to failure of a firewall, or other equipment, at the customer site. In either case the network management center is no longer able to provide management services, monitoring services or security services. The network management center is not able to determine whether a failed connection to the customer site is due to Internet congestion or due to failure of equipment at the customer site. Furthermore, since there is no connection established to the customer site, in the event that the connection is lost due to equipment failure at the customer site the network management center cannot manage the equipment at the customer site to rectify any problems since there is no connection established.